In January 1998 Linda Schele gave a long, filmed interview in which she talked
freely and frankly in her own inimitable style about her life, work, and philosophy. This
has been edited, together with extra visual material, in order to make a 50 minute
documentary tribute. Entitled EDGEWALKER: a conversation with Linda Schele,
this film was shown at the 1999 Texas Maya Meetings and at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum Maya Weekend. Video tapes of it are available for the purchase price of $39.95 (plus
applicable sales tax and shipping). A substantial percentage of this price (50%) will be
donated to the Linda and David Schele Chair in the Art and Writing of Mesoamerica at the
University of Texas at Austin.

When she died of cancer in April 1998, at the height of her powers, Linda Schele was
the dominant personality in the field of Maya studies  a subject of abiding
fascination for a public enamoured of mysterious ruins and seemingly impenetrable
inscriptions; an ancient culture which left behind a legacy of incredible images of
beauty, power and terror.

Professor in the History of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, Linda Schele had
become one of the best known communicators to the public of the extraordinary discoveries
which have changed our understanding of this ancient culture. Through her many television
appearances on Discovery, National Geographic, PBS, BBC and A&E; her groundbreaking
exhibition Blood of Kings; and her best-selling and award winning books  Forest
of Kings, Maya Cosmos, and most recently Code of Kings and Hidden
Faces of the Maya, she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who
believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and
delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her
inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many
keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address
their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view.

An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an
artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field
as a young woman  just some strange little painter from Alabama
 in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when
the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the
most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past.

Linda was first captivated by the Maya on a chance visit to the ruins of Palenque in
Mexico. At one of the most romantic archaeological sites in the world she found traces of
a society where art was central  something of which as an
artist and art teacher she had dreamed.

Like many who fall in love with Palenque she vowed to return. Unlike most, she
did again and again. In time, it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a
crucial role in breaking the code of the Mayas hieroglyphic writing
system.

Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings,
rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of
Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own
rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these
oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele
considered her most important work.

The film EDGEWALKER pays tribute to Linda Schele by telling her story
through her own words in the form of an interview in which she discusses her ideas by
relating them to her personal life. This interview material is supported by a wide range
of visual images including video footage of her talking to her tour groups on site at
Palenque and Tikal, Schele family home movie footage, and photographs and the fine
photography of Justin Kerr and MacDuff Everton. The film concludes with footage of the
extraordinary ceremony, conducted by Maya priests, in which Linda was laid to rest
overlooking Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, in the land of the Maya to whom she devoted her life.